Private Cloud 2.0
Todd Matters , CTO of RackWare and I sat down to share some our thoughts on the current state of private cloud. Cloud has been a mainstay of tech stacks around the world for more than 15 years. During that time cloud technology has grown and changed. Keeping with that same thinking, the initial tenants of private cloud have changed as well. Here is some of our thinking, but first let's set the table.
According to the Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud report, Eighty-nine percent of respondents reported having a multi-cloud strategy, and?80 percent?are taking a hybrid approach by combining the use of both public and private clouds.
If 80% of organizations are utilizing hybrid cloud, what we are really saying is that the umbrella term hybrid cloud is the unification of three environments.?First, onsite (or on premises) is a traditional datacenter for those mission critical application that shall not ?be shared or compromised in any way. This can also be a third party colocation facility.?Extraneous constraints and considerations are not worthy of even prioritizing in this arena when caring for these applications.?The onsite (on premises) datacenters may also be running older systems not supported in a Cloud or maybe they just haven’t been moved to a Cloud environment yet.???
Second, also premises based, is a private Cloud.?Private Cloud brings the flexibility and speed of Cloud to the safe, comfortable confines of the onsite datacenter.?Departments can spin things up quickly, repurpose servers, experiment, and research without the hassle of those pesky server requisition forms, not to mention the costly time involved for procurement and then someone to actually touch a server and perform the long list of installations and configurations to make it operational.?Private Cloud is ideal for applications still too sensitive and/or mission critical for Public Cloud but don’t need the dedication of a static datacenter.?Importantly, Private Cloud is not shared with any other companies.?There is no competition for performance, all compute resources are always available for in-Company computing.?And possibly most important, in the event of an emergency, Company IT is making decisions for itself, rather than a Public CSP making decisions with all their tenants in mind.?And for the finance folks, with Private Cloud money never leaves the company as in Public Cloud (at least not directly).?And this is an excellent baby step for moving applications to the Cloud.??
Third, of course, there will be Public Cloud in the milieu. Given the cost and complexity of onsite datacenters for power, cooling, redundance, physical security, virtual security, compartmentalized bomb proof rooms, etc.or perhaps the need to continually refresh equipment in a third party colocation facility, companies may have opted to move workloads to the public cloud.
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A Hybrid environment allow companies to reduce their expensive datacenter footprint and all the opex and capex costs associated with it. The dance of how these three environments interact, and what goes where will take time to mature.?But rest assured, it will happen.?
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But what happened to Private Cloud???Early on, when the promise of Private/Hybrid Cloud could be seen in those Cloud toddler eyes there were a lot of initiatives.?Most prominent were OpenStack and CloudStack.??Turns out building a Private Cloud was a lot harder (a LOT harder) than most people thought.?Cloud touches every aspect of computing and in Cloud every aspect of computing must be virtualized and provisioned instantaneously, configured, monitored, meet security and privacy requirements (both sciences all to themselves today).?Beyond just the complexities of software, deploying the hardware components, ensuring performance, meeting the ebb and flow of compute needs adds other dimensions to Private Cloud.?
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Most companies abandoned their Private Cloud efforts and focused on migrating their “low hanging fruit” to Public Cloud.?I would argue this was a good thing.?
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So, is Private Cloud dead??By no means.?All the same reasons for Private Cloud still exist today.?And now Private Cloud is being enabled by the same companies that build the best Public Clouds.?They are now a Private Cloud Easy Button—software and hardware to meet a specific set of workload needs that is prebuilt and delivered with a nice bow around it.?Companies can just unwrap and use.?Let’s call this Private Cloud 2.0
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Private Cloud 2.0 is an opportunity for Public CSPs to leverage their development effort additional sales.?In addition, hardware vendors will also be driving the adoption Cloud Appliance. This form of?Hybrid Cloud also benefits hardware vendors by retaining a target market beyond Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) to sell servers, switches, routers, and storage.?What a boring world it would be for laptops to be the only computer hardware to be marketed and sold outside of CSPs (though the evolution of the thin client to the Cloud is a subject all to itself).?
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Follow along in our next blog. We’ll take the time to tease out some of the private cloud 2.0 offerings available in the marketplace today
Thought Leader focused on creating meaningful adjustments in an environment that is rapidly growing | Global 40-under- 40 Cybersecurity | Identity | Cloud Security | Author/Advisor | Investor | Board Member QTE | GCISO |
2 年Great insights Jo Peterson
Internationally Known AI and Cloud Computing Thought Leader and Influencer, Enterprise Technology Innovator, Educator, Best Selling Author, Speaker, GenAI Architecture Mentor, Over the Hill Mountain Biker.
2 年This is thinking that is long overdue. We're going to run workloads on premises, but need bigger thinking and standards.
Chief Technology Advisor - The Futurum Group
2 年With all of the effort and investment poured into Kubernetes, we now have the technology and ecosystem to talk seriously about Private Cloud efforts. The industry has come a long way on whole. Great points.